Various estate planning vehicles, such as wills, allow individuals to pass along money, real estate, personal property, and other defined assets to family or friends after that individual's death. There is a lack of effective means, however, to automatically pass along person-to-person information upon the occurrence of a predefined event. For example, a father who wants to leave a collection of video messages for friends and family to watch after his death faces logistical challenges and considerable expense in recording, storing, centralizing and delivering this collection of posthumous messages on a predetermined timeline. Alternately, even if the individual's death does not occur by the time of a predetermined event, such as the child's sixteenth birthday or college graduation, the individual still faces uncertainty about his or her ability to participate in these life events. For example, an individual may face restricted access to their child following an unanticipated separation from his family or home country, a long-term relocation for business, or military deployment. In another example, mobility or financial restrictions may limit a person's ability to visit certain locations with family members, such as theme parks or cruises.
As social networking becomes an integral tool for communication across the globe, older techniques of recording significant life events stand to grow obsolete or be abandoned by the coming generations. What is lacking in the current social networking environment, however, is a future-oriented model of planned communication, and more specifically, a planned communication tool that is built to structure itself to a timeline of events.
Therefore, there is a need for an effective means of providing person-to-person information to select recipients upon the occurrence of certain events, such as a death, engagements, graduations, birthdays or other life event, at a specific time or date; and/or when the recipient is in a specific location.